Barton: Imperial's bitter end

Friends and relatives of the 14 workers killed five years ago in the mammoth blast and fire that leveled much of the Imperial Sugar refinery in Port Wentworth have learned some important lessons.

The first is that it’s good to be the boss.

When people die on your watch, you still get to keep your job, as then-CEO John Sheptor did after the Feb. 7, 2008, catastrophe.

He even got a pay raise a year later — a cool $1 million in money and stock. Nice.

As an added sweetener, the fat cats holding Imperial stock when the company sold out last year to private agribusiness giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities picked up a big chunk of extra change, probably prompting many of them to dance a jig all the way to the bank. Or the BMW dealership.

That’s because the Netherlands-based Dreyfus paid a hefty 57 percent premium for each share of Imperial stock.

Talk about easy money.

The second lesson is that death and destruction can be a good thing for a company’s future.

Prior to the 2008 catastrophe, Imperial’s century-old refinery along the Savannah River was antiquated, inefficient and an accident waiting to happen. Routine housekeeping and maintenance had been ignored for years.

That’s not the case now. Today, this refinery is considered state-of-the-art. It’s clean, efficient and looks like you could lick sugar from the floor — if you could find the rare granule that escaped.

And here’s the kicker. Texas-based Imperial and its stockholders didn’t have to eat the cost of the estimated $200-million rebuild. Instead, Imperial’s insurance carrier did.

As the Houston Business Chronicle reported in 2009 — the same year Sheptor got his pay boost — Imperial settled a $345 million insurance claim with its carrier. Previously, the carrier provided advance claim payments aggregating $300 million under the $350 million policy that Imperial had, which provides for replacement cost coverage of physical property damage and business interruption coverage.

Bottom line: Imperial was stuck with a lemon that blew up. It gained a sweetheart of a refinery that’s the envy of the industry, making it doubly attractive to buyers like Dreyfus.

Here’s the third lesson. Even if there’s a corporate whistleblower at the home office in Sugar Land, Texas, and even when the federal government’s own investigators believe Imperial’s execs “willfully” violated most of the 124 safety violations at the refinery, that doesn’t mean justice will be served.

Or even be given a chance.

Last week, federal prosecutors in Savannah announced that they won’t pursue criminal charges against Imperial’s former management for a tragedy that the U.S. Chemical Safety Board termed “entirely preventable.” Thus the only real punishment the feds will have dished out was $4 million in fines. That’s peanuts in the corporate world — and in the local world of ordinary shysters, too.

Two years before the refinery blast, U.S. District Judge B. Avant Edenfield fined a Savannah man and his son $6.5 million for scheming to defraud Medicaid. And he also sent the younger man to prison for 25 years. Thus, it’s apparently worse to take some of Uncle Sam’s money than to willfully do things that can cause people to die or become permanently disfigured.

Today, it’s all’s well that ends well for those in Imperial’s former front office. They’re freed of the prospect of winding up in front of judge like Edenfield.

In the meantime, for the family of Michael “Big Mike” Williams, 51, it’s tough luck.